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The 1987 film "Ishtar" has long held a cultural status much larger than that of just a single movie, as shorthand for the utter worst, an epochal flop with audiences and critics alike and a huge financial bomb. Its air of failure has become all-encompassing, or as one of the songs featured in the movie put it, "Hello, Ishtar ... You're a state of mind." The notorious reputation of "Ishtar" as too-expensive and no-good has long crushed the actual film. Last summer, the headline of a New York Times article on the box-office performance of "John Carter" declared "'Ishtar' lands on Mars," and just recently an angry investor...

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The 1987 film "Ishtar" has long held a cultural status much larger than that of just a single movie, as shorthand for the utter worst, an epochal flop with audiences and critics alike and a huge financial bomb. Its air of failure has become...

Summer is the season for blockbusters at the box office, and this year Hollywood is going all in.
Midway through a year of declining attendance and ticket sales, the major studios are betting heavily on big-budget spectacles that can fatten the bottom...

Directors, actors and animation fans of all stripes saluted Ray Harryhausen on Tuesday as news of the visual effects pioneer's death reached Hollywood.
Harryhausen, the stop-motion animator of such classics as 1955's "It Came From Outer Space,"...

In Walt Disney Studios' remake of "The Lone Ranger," the masked lawman and his loopy sidekick, Tonto, stop a runaway train, are beaten by bad guys and besieged by scorpions, and blow up a massive bridge with dynamite — all while trying to avenge...

In "47 Ronin," Keanu Reeves portrays the leader of a band of ronin — masterless samurai in 18th-century Japan who must suffer the indignity of having no one to lead them in battle. Turns out that plot line provides an apt metaphor for the period...